February flew by and I created some kind of artness in my Moleskine Daily Planner every day. I like the ‘anything goes’ feel that the Moleskine still has. I stick stuff in and sketch, paint and I even machine stitched a page! I also painted every day in my Strathmore sketchbook. I didn’t land on a theme for February but I soon went right back to using my sumi brush with watered down gouache this time. Onwards and upwards, here comes March! Happy Wednesday x
Week two of Art 101 and we are messing about with texture. I worked on one of the pages I started last week and added some texture using a doily to print and then I stuck it down when I had printed with it and it was starting to get soggy! The second page is a background I made a while ago. I added some texture to this page and the first page using gold paint and a mesh bag which had lemons in it which had to be emptied out. I painted on the quote and all done! ‘Enable the chance for something to happen’ – sound advice from Christoph Niemann who is featured on the first episode of ‘Abstract’ on Netflix. I have watched the first three episodes and it is an excellent series about the design process. If you are interested in the Get Messy Art Journaling community, check out their website and public blog. Happy Creating and Happy Thursday.
I have never participated in a traveling journal before, so I did what anyone would and I joined two groups! This is the first journal and my colour is grey. How it works is I make a journal and art a couple of spreads inside using greys only. Then I send it onto the next person in the group and so it continues until eventually it comes back to me full of grey goodness. We have five artists and we each have a different colour, so I wonder which journal I will get first and what colour it will be? I like the restriction of only using one colour, it allows me to concentrate on other areas without having to plan a colour palette. I have used Paynes Grey in the book and it looks blue to me, but I am getting away with it because it is officially called ‘grey’ and it is one of my most favorite colours. Also silver counts as grey right!? I can’t wait to paint and draw in everyones …
This season of Get Messy Art Journal is all about getting down to the art basics and building repertoire of techniques and ideas. The first week was no disappointment, there were tutorials in painting faces and creating backgrounds and lots of mini prompts and ideas pouring out of the Get Messy community! I put my spin on a background using watercolor and pulled out my trusty gelli plate to add the wishy washy colour to the pages of my sketchbooks and I also printed onto some pages from a vintage typewriting book. Lots of sketchbooks are essential for me because I always end up starting many pages at the same time and they all need to dry before I carry on to the next layer or page. I tried various colour palettes and I love these backgrounds. I added a page to a page and I will continue to layer onto this spread. These pages started with a self portrait painted on the inside of security envelopes using a sumi brush and black sumi ink. …
At the end of 2016 I decided to buy a ‘large’ 8.25″x 5″ Moleskine daily planner with a bright orange cover and every day of 2017 I would art on that day’s page. The first couple of pages were a bit rubbish, but then I relaxed about the whole thing and painted a tea cup on day three. This planner is my playtime, the place I can experiment and slap colour about with abandon. I don’t worry that the pages are too thin to hold watercolor or that my favorite pen goes through, because it just means that on the next page I will use collage or start with a layer of acrylic to work on top of. So far I have used watercolor, collage, acrylic, sumi ink, pen, neon, gelli plate and words. I am happy to draw or paint or just make some marks or add some colour. The day is documented sometimes with a little watercolor sketch, whatever comes to mind. February will continue randomly or I will find a theme, who …
I started working in one of my mini journals today, and I love it love it love it! Each page is a little quick delve into colour, collage and drawing. I have used acrylic paints which dry nice and quickly, so I can work through the journal without having to wait ages for paint to dry. I started with my new friend, the ‘owlat’ which came about in a previous page and I thought the image looked like a owl crossed with a cat. I drew this one more deliberately, guiding the triangles as I went. The fold out pages are fun and I tried to make them work with each other and the pages around them by adding a similar flower motif in pen (I used white Uniball and a blue Micron). I am becoming very interested in old photos as well as postcards and this is a copy of a vintage photograph. I wonder who she was? Collage is a new addition to my art journaling and I am enjoying using snips of …
Are you easily influenced? I am and I have been spotting mini art journals all over the interwebs, mainly Instagram and I wanted to make my very own teeny tiny journal. So I did! I have lots of paper ephemera ranging from maps to paper bags via old National Geographic magazines and sports order forms, so I thought I would drag it all out and make a book or five! You know how it is, once you start, you can’t stop. I started with a couple of small but not mini books, they are about five and a half inches by four inches and some of the pages fold out to make a wider spread. To stitch them together at the spine, I used wax linen and pamphlet stitch. I found a good book at the library with lots of clear instructions called How to make Books by Esther K. Smith which is full of great ideas including the single signature pamphlet or leaflet style book. I cut out three different size mini journals, the …
I have a love/hate relationship with blind contour drawing. It is super fun to do but the results are always at best hilarious, but more often just horrific! On a couple of these I cheated a little and looked every so often. They are all done using a sumi brush and ink except the last one. The ones which look like a bald monster were done following the rules and no looking, even when I was filling my brush. While doing the other two, I peeked a couple of times usually when filling my brush. I think they retain the free and loose effect, but a little less horror story! The final one is in my handmade journal and I started the page with some vintage dress pattern paper and some pink acrylic paint. I drew some faces directly onto the page and some onto dry wax paper which I glued over the whole thing. I also used a water soluble pencil which has dissolved a bit under the matt medium I used to …
I have been playing in my Season of Gifts journal and it is filling up nicely. I am doing a horrible job at following any prompts, so the gift I am appreciating is the gift of being able to create these pages and share them with you. Because the journal is all kinds of different papers, not many spreads have the same paper on both sides. This one has water colour paper on one side which I painted a galaxy using the Liquitex ‘muted’ inks and a white ink as contrast. The other side is the back of the red pattern paper which is really crinkly. I added my lady and gave her a gold border then I drew with white pen and inadvertently ended up with a cat/owl creature on her headscarf. I have a feeling this character will show up some more now I have ‘invented’ her, I love the idea of an owl/cat creature! This spread is a magazine cutting of a landscape with a gelli print on dry wax paper glued …
I may have taken on too much this year in the way of daily challenges (I hope not!), I have started with two projects which are going to be daily for the whole year. Look how new and skinny these books look now, I can’t wait to show you a picture of them bulging and messy with paint and pen! I am going to be making a daily doodle, pattern, drawing, collage, whatever comes into my head in my daily Moleskine planner/sketchbook. This is my ‘quick’ daily art. The pages are quite thin, so I will not be adding too much media but if I decide to go for it, I can just stick some collage onto the following page. This diary is aiming to be a freeform art project, my playtime if you will. The page may be relevant to the day or not, I may even just write all over some days, let’s see! The second daily 365 challenge is to make a painting or drawing a day. This book is bigger and …
Clare Davis Etheridge 